This invention relates to a keyboard-based input system for computers, word processors, and the like used for inputting Japanese and/or English characters.
The computer is rapidly becoming a necessity for daily life all over the world. Although this is true in Japan, the computer is much less popular there than in the United States. It is believed that one of the major reasons for this is that most people are not used to the keyboard and find inputting Japanese a difficult task.
Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the "kana input method," uses a keyboard that has 46 Japanese iroha (or kana) letter keys. In the other method, the "Roma-ji input method," the computer keyboard has the QWERTY key arrangement (U.S. Pat. No. 207,557 by C. L. Sholes), the universally accepted standard for inputting English. In this method, Japanese kana letters are composed as combinations of the English (or Roman) alphabet letters representing columns and rows of the gojyuon table; once the proper combination of English letters is typed in, the computer finds a corresponding Japanese letter for that sound.
Neither of these methods is ideal for inputting Japanese to the computer. In the kana input method, touch-typing is very difficult because there are far more kana characters in Japanese (46) than letters in the English alphabet, and it is difficult to remember the location of each character on the keyboard. In the Roma-ji input method, the QWERTY arrangement is not only foreign to most Japanese users, but also difficult to use, discouraging many from using it. The QWERTY arrangement resulted from the need to arrange frequently used letter keys apart from each other to minimize the jamming and clashing of typebars in typewriters, not from any consideration of ease of use or efficiency. August Dvorak and William Dealey proposed an improved key arrangement (U.S. Pat. No. 2,040,248) for inputting English characters. Their system might somewhat increase the productivity of inputting Japanese to the computer, but it has never become popular. Besides, even if it were adopted for the Roma-ji input method, Japanese users would still have difficulty remembering the location of each character on the keyboard.
In addition, the existing methods are not flexible enough in inputting the growing number of foreign-origin words used in the Japanese language. Such words are written with a special style letter called "kata kana." The problem is not the use of "kata kana," but that in spelling foreign words methods not found in standard (or original) Japanese are applied, and the currently available input methods cannot easily accommodate them.
To overcome these problems, various input methods have been explored and developed over the years; the use of pen and voice are a couple of examples. We believe, however, that the keyboard is still the most efficient input method and that improvement of it is essential. New key arrangement methods proposed in recent years are Japanese patent application disclosures No. 60-225925 by Seiichiro Ube, No. 2-170215 by Hideo Koike et al., and No. 4-119415 by Masao Kubo et al. None of these new methods, however, is satisfactory for practical use, because they do not satisfy all the requirements for a new keyboard: namely, the arrangement of the keyboard must be simple and logical; the keyboard must integrate Japanese and English input methods; and it must be able to easily handle both original Japanese words and foreign-origin Japanese words.
The primary objective of this invention is to make inputting Japanese and English to the computer or word processor easy, especially for those who are familiar with the structure of the Japanese letter system gojyuon, which literally translates to English as "the 50 sounds."